Social Butterflies: Using Social Media to Strengthen Developer Communities

In the past year, Sun Developer Network has reached out to its community through social media. It currently hosts the SDN Channel, a blog that highlights videos on Sun technologies and products as well as updates from Sun’s Campus Ambassadors via the CampusCast series. In addition to the SDN Channel, the “Sun Total Access Network” :http://www.youtube.com/user/suntotalaccessnet/ on YouTube posts on-the-fly interviews with top Sun executives and employees as they make the “magic” happen inside of Sun. SDN has also turned to microblogging in the form of Twitter to communicate program benefits, event updates, and to conduct community trivia challenges and award JavaOne passes. This is in addition to the numerous podcasts, Second Life chats, Facebook pages, and websites that support products and technologies at Sun.

But what is the future? We all want to stay on the cutting edge of Web 2.0 technologies, so where do we go next? And how do we differentiate our programs from others when 96% of our enterprise community is doing the same?